Verrat an der eigenen Klasse?

Von Aufsteigerinnen, der neuen Klassenliteratur und der Bohème.

Abstract

The ›class question‹ is booming, both in sociology and in literature. At the same time, sociologists and writers direct their attention to themselves, at the latest with the hybrid form of socio-autobiography. This surprizing ›turn‹, in which the social topic of class is crossed with individual self-reflection, originated in France, but quickly found imitators in Germany. If one looks at the writings of the German epigones of Didier Eribon, it is striking that while in France social advancement is generally the critically reflected theme, the majority of German-language novels adopt a positioning that borrows from the historical bohème and identifies with the pose of the precarious artist. The present article develops the thesis that the authors of relevant socio-autobiographies, contrary to their self-perception, should be counted among the climbers in the new middle class that is shaping the aesthetic society. These ›class transitioners‹ see themselves as part of an anti-bourgeois subculture that introduced the cultural change in values from discipline, duty and an increase in the standard of living to creativity, flexibility, self-realization and quality of life, but has been overtaken by its own dynamics of success and advancement since the 1960s and now finds itself as a creative class in the middle of upper middle-class society.